Rallying cry for media under Trump: Make FOIA Great Again

By Philip Eli, Columbia Journalism Review, Nov. 18, 2016

DONALD TRUMP HAS NEVER held elected office. So it’s possible he thinks he can run the the Executive Branch like one of his private companies. But the president-elect does not own the Department of Transportation, the US Navy, or any of the other agencies under his command. We do. And we, the people, under the Freedom of Information Act, have a right to access the material they produce, unless it falls under one of nine exemptions.

The FOIA, notably, places no limit on the number of requests an agency can receive or a person can submit. And it is with this fact in mind—and Trump’s well-document fondness for superlatives—that I suggest we make Donald Trump the most FOIA-requested president in US history. This wouldn’t just give him another sentence for his astonishingly long-winded online biography, it just may offer a path to redemption for our beleaguered news industry.